


Sounds Like Torture To Me: "Babylon" and the Bush Era

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [40]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Babylon, Episode Review, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, season 10 e5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 09:17:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6111967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What’s under this cut tag is going to be extremely negative. EXTREMELY. This episode pushed a LOT of buttons for me relating to the atrocities my own government committed during the two George W. Bush administrations. I’m just warning you now. Apart from the Mulder/Scully bookends, I found almost none of this episode tasty; and indeed, I was unable to completely rinse the smell of the putrid case plot out of the ship stuff in which it was wrapped. These layers interpenetrate, in “Babylon,” in most unfortunate ways. But before I crawl into my negativity den, let me just say: we were warned. We should have seen this coming. As far as the X-Files’ treatment of people of color and non-Christian religions, this is more or less what the X-Files was like. It seems worse to most of us now for two reasons. One: Chris Carter has lost his mind. I mean more than usually, in this episode. Two: most of us have learned a lot since the 1990s, whereas Chris Carter has not learned a God damn thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sounds Like Torture To Me: "Babylon" and the Bush Era

  


There’s an anecdote that writers tell about what it’s like working in Hollywood. You are sitting there talking to a producer and he really likes your ideas and is very excited about doing your show except there is one really terrible thing he wants to do to it that will ruin about 60% of your idea. It is as if, they say, the producer is offering you a beautiful gourmet sandwich filled with tapenade and microgreens and home-cured charcuterie and everything else that you love, and in the middle of it, there’s a piece of shit. And you look at this shit sandwich, and you think, “Maybe if I just eat around it…”

Chris Carter has invented an inversion of this trope: the ship sandwich. This is a term I have invented, just now, to describe an X-Files episode which is pure crap most of the time, but around which Carter has wrapped a thin layer of tempting Mulder/Scully relationship stuff in the hope of making it palatable. And we the fans look at this fascinating yet revolting object, and we think, “Maybe if I just peel off the outer layer and then rinse it thoroughly…”

“Milagro” was such an episode. So was “The Unnatural” (I know, David wrote that one, but Chris Carter let him). And so, to the hundredth power, is “Babylon.”

What’s under this cut tag is going to be extremely negative. EXTREMELY. This episode pushed a LOT of buttons for me relating to the atrocities my own government committed during the two George W. Bush administrations. I’m just warning you now. Apart from the Mulder/Scully bookends, I found almost none of this episode tasty; and indeed, I was unable to completely rinse the smell of the putrid case plot out of the ship stuff in which it was wrapped. These layers interpenetrate, in “Babylon,” in most unfortunate ways. But before I crawl into my negativity den, let me just say: we were warned. We should have seen this coming. As far as the X-Files’ treatment of people of color and non-Christian religions, this is more or less what the X-Files was like. It seems worse to most of us now for two reasons. One: Chris Carter has lost his mind. I mean more than usually, in this episode. Two: most of us have learned a lot since the 1990s, whereas Chris Carter has not learned a God damn thing.

 All right. So, in my review of [“Home Again,”](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/139066014859/you-are-responsible-trash-art-and-creating-a) I mentioned that it appeared to me that Glen Morgan was making an effort to correct some of the mistakes that the X-Files made back in the nineties about its treatment of “exotic” religions and cultures:

**The idea that an object created by humans in the likeness living creature could be alive, or be a vessel for divine or demonic or some other kind of energy or power, is a feature of some world religions and a source of considerable anxiety in others. The X-Files, back in the day, used this idea as the basis for quite a number of MOTWs; and often these stories were imbued with a kind of fascination/horror with ‘primitive,’ i.e., non-European cultures. In fact, in many vintage X-Files episodes, the supernatural force at work is eventually traced back to a ‘primitive’ and/or exotic religion or folk tradition. In “Our Town,” for instance–a classic early MOTW in which a small town is practicing cannibalism in order to stay young–the ringleader is discovered to have a whole cabinet full of artifacts from his journeys in Africa; in “Teliko” the killer is a creature from African folklore; I’m not even going to tell you about what happens in “Badlaa,” which is probably the absolute worst use ever made of this premise in the first nine seasons. This kind of exploitation of the Exotic Other as a source of horror and mystery is the kind of thing that one found vaguely troubling in the 1990s, but upon rewatch in the 21st century seems pretty indefensible.**

I am now sort of wondering whether Chris Carter ever showed the script of “Babylon” to Glen Morgan during the writing process. Perhaps that’s a little too tinfoil-hattish. But one thing is for sure: in 2016, Chris Carter still sees NOTHING wrong with the way his show used to conflate the monstrous, mysterious, and magical with that which is not white and/or Christian.

The root of the word “occult” is a Latin word meaning hidden or concealed. It is therefore not that much of a surprise that a show written almost exclusively by white men, which is about the search for hidden truth, would often find mysteries in nonwhite communities and cultures, especially in non-English speaking cultures where the meaning of even the simplest of mundane things is hidden from those who don’t speak the language. Chris Carter is not the first white man to misinterpret a confrontation with his own ignorance as a mystic revelation from the ineffable unknown. Indeed, the history of western literature is full of such misinterpretations. Chinua Achebe’s landmark essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s _Heart of Darkness_ ” describes, with wonderful and righteous anger and contempt, how ridiculous that novel looks from an African perspective. To Joseph Conrad, Africa is Inscrutable and Mysterious and Vaguely Horrifying only because he’s not from there, he doesn’t speak any of the local languages, he knows nothing about the local culture–and he is not interested in learning anything that might interfere with the ignorance that creates the great Mystery that he believes he has found there. None of the African characters in _Heart of Darkness_ speak, except in extremely fragmentary and broken English; most of the time, they’re just dancing and jabbering (if they are in their natural environment) or suffering and dying (if they have been unlucky enough to fall into the Company’s clutches). The administration of the Belgian Congo was one of the worst atrocities of the age of European imperialism; about nine million people in that region died while Belgium was expropriating their resources and enslaving their communities. Now when you suggest to people, as Achebe was not at all timid about suggesting, that it is violently offensive to treat this gigantic humanitarian catastrophe as merely the backdrop against which to play out the tragedy of a single white man losing his damn mind, what they will usually say (if they’ve read the novel) is that Conrad is very critical of the Company and very sympathetic to its African victims. At which point you say, well, that’s true; but he’s only sympathetic to them _as_ victims. When their suffering is not mutely testifying to the cruelty and stupidity of the oppressive, exploitative, incompetent yet powerful organization that Conrad hates, he finds African people terrifying. Sort of the same way that Chris Carter can generate sympathy for a young Muslim man who is grotesquely stitched up like Frankenstein’s monster and just about dead, but when it comes to whole and healthy Muslim men, he appears to find them universally terrifying.

I’ve seen people scratching their heads in bafflement about the tone problems in this episode. Let me suggest that the source of most of them is Chris Carter’s decision to repeat Conrad’s foundational mistake–with a twist. The reason “Babylon” strikes us all as so much more bizarre and WTFfy than _Heart of Darkness_ or indeed than most actual X-Files is that instead of using the clusterfuck of imperialist, terrorist, and counterterrorist state violence that has turned life into a nightmare for large numbers of Muslims–living both in the US and in the regions where the vast majority of this violence actually takes place–as the backdrop for a _tragedy_ , Carter uses it as the backdrop for a screwball romantic comedy. Which, in addition to making no emotional sense for the viewers, makes the insult even worse. 

Because clearly, what Carter really cares about in this episode is using their younger doubles, Special Agents Einstein and Miller, to bring Mulder and Scully back together–or as close together as he is willing to let them get. That’s where most of the best writing is: in the interactions between the quartet of star-crossed FBI lovers. It’s like Carter is trying to stage his own little _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ here, with the magic mushrooms playing the role of Puck’s magic flower-juice. It doesn’t help that even this part of the episode, to me, doesn’t work. Miller has no discernible personality. Einstein at least is interesting to watch, but her interactions with Mulder are quite strange. Since she has zero faith in Mulder’s ability to shroom himself into a communicative state, why do the trick with the niacin capsules? It’s a waste of precious time on a case she appears to care deeply about. Her decision to waste further time ‘debunking’ Mulder can only be motivated if we assume either that she has started to take some kind of personal interest in Mulder, or (more likely) that she is jealous of Miller’s interest in Scully. Now if I was pissed off at all the times we saw Jealous Scully acting possessive of Mulder for no good reason, I am further annoyed to see her Einstein acting possessive of Miller for even less reason. Come on, Chris; do ALL of your Scullys have to be motivated by jealousy?

More to the point, though, Miller and Einstein are such obvious, exact, and inexplicable doubles for Mulder and Scully that their mere presence turns “Babylon” into a self-parody. The distinction between self-parody and meta humor is something that Chris Carter has often failed to grasp. As I mentioned earlier, the last time he introduced two obvious doubles for Mulder and Scully was in “Fight Club,” an absolute cow pat of a ‘comic’ episode in which Chris Carter utterly failed to be funny because he couldn’t control his resentment of his own characters. Duchovny was responsible for a similar misfire at around the same time in “Hollywood, A.D.,” a terrible parody episode which is just a loosely connected string of gags, only some of which are funny. Darin Morgan’s “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” is useful here as a contrasting example: there are a lot of meta-jokes about the show and the characters in MASMTWM, including a little mini-delusion involving Scully and Guy Mann in the back room at the phone store; but the case itself provides a bedrock level of **emotional** reality even if it doesn’t have a whole lot of **rational** integrity. The were-monster, impossible as he is, is an engaging and individualized character whose psychic sufferings are made real to us in a variety of ways–and who, I should point out, gets better character development than ANY of the Muslim characters in this episode get, and you better believe I am including Shiraz’s mother. (Shiraz and his mom at least get names. Shiraz’s co-bomber is just listed on the IMDB cast page as “Young Muslim.”) The terrorism case which all four of these agents are supposed to be investigating was probably supposed to provide the Serious and Real grounding which would keep the parody from flittering off into the ether. Well, it doesn’t.

As with Watergate, Chris Carter’s attempts to cover up the Islamophobia embedded in “Babylon” are just as big a problem as the original crime. Carter intends to present this episode as a parable about finding common ground, getting over our differences, communicating with each other by transcending the petty physical and social barriers created by our embodied mortal experiences and our pedestrian self-consciousness. In other words, he wants “Babylon” to read as magnanimous, an example of Christian and Western broad-mindedness and tolerance. At the same time, however, Carter is–on the evidence of “Babylon”–clearly unable to conceive of Muslim men as anything other than actual or potential terrorists. That shows up all over the place in ways large and small. The cold open, for instance, is absolutely infuriating in this regard. First we see Shiraz praying, then making himself and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. What could be more American than this nice young man and his white bread? Then he is harassed at a stoplight by a bunch of Ugly Texans in a pickup truck. And just as you are thinking how unfair it is for these jackasses to be so racist toward this nice young man, he and another nice young man walk into an art gallery and blow it up. Hm. I guess they actually WERE terrorists after all!

And the dishonesty of that sequence just infuriates me. We are obviously supposed to disapprove of the blatant racism of these stage Texans, just as we are supposed to disapprove of the nurse’s attempted murder of a patient in her care and her batshit tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory racism. **And yet the plot of this episode continually validates the racism that we are supposed to despise when we see it in the Texan characters.** This was exactly the problem with white liberal racial politics in the 1990s: we deplored instances of **interpersonal** racism and ignored clear evidence of **structural** racism. Because it’s easy and fun to feel superior to some asshole who’s made a bigoted remark; but it’s difficult and threatening to identify and dismantle the structures that protect your own white privilege. And thus we discover that we’re going to have to spend the 21st century attacking structural racism. I say ‘we,’ but clearly Chris Carter missed that memo.

I see people complaining about the highly stereotyped representation of Texans. It is indeed highly stereotyped. It has to be. Because **there have to be white people in this episode who are more racist than Chris Carter, so that Carter can demonstrate his own moral superiority by criticizing them.**  It’s pure CYA and he is willing to resort to regionalist stereotype in order to do it, especially because he evidently thinks that Texan stereotypes are HILARIOUS.

Time is pressing and I need to move on; but let me just point out something subtle but extremely revealing about the final moments of the cold open. Shiraz and his young friend are, by the standards most white heterosexual males use for their social interactions with each other, unusually physically intimate. They hug, they kiss each other hello, they hold hands during their final prayer, and they walk into the art gallery with their arms around each other. So if you don’t realize that in many non-American cultures men don’t have all this panic and shame about casual touching, Shiraz and friend read as a nice young gay couple on their way to enjoy an art event. They walk into the gallery. After they go through the doors, a car pulls up to the valet area (Shiraz has not tried to get anyone to valet-park his beat up vintage American rustbucket) and a more middle-aged, affluent white heterosexual couple, both dressed up for their gallery event, hand the keys to the valet. The car drives off; they’re about to walk in; and BOOM! When the smoke clears, we can see this straight couple, burned and bloody from the explosion, crawling agonizingly along the ground as quite a number of stunt men on fire stumble through the rubble-strewn facade. 

“What about the victims?” says Einstein, when Miller wonders what Shiraz was thinking in those last few moments before the explosion. Cold open asks the same question, imposes the same priorities, with the added bonus of assuming that our sympathies will naturally lie with the affluent white heterosexual victims rather than the Muslim, brown, and ambiguously gay bombers.

I bring this up because this weird combination of orthodox Catholic social politics and Islamophobia is actually the keynote of “Babylon.” The two mysterious Arabic-speaking “agents” who Miller identifies as being there for “retribution” insist that Shiraz is dead–which then turns that scene, very briefly and bizarrely, into a replay of the Terry Schiavo controversy, with Scully taking up the anti-euthanasia side. Mulder’s hallucination punishes him for his fantasies of honky-tonk badonkadonk–I guess we can call all those booty-shaking Texan girls on the dance floor the Whores of Babylon–by literally scourging him, in a sequence which conflates BDSM play with actual torture. That bizarre little moment with Agent Einsten and her…riding crop? maybe?…is sandwiched between a callback to Mulder’s torture after his abduction in “Requiem” and the most intensely bizarre phase of the entire hallucination, in which Cancer Man is both the slave-driver on a Roman galley and a personification of the CIA goons whose push for ‘actionable intelligence’ created the conditions that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib (referenced by the black hoods on the men rowing the boat). In the midst of all this Mel-Gibson’s- _The-Passion_ -like eroticized violence, it is of course no surprise that we find Shiraz and his mother posed like Michaelangelo’s Pieta; it is of a piece with the rest of the Christian WTFery introduced at the beginning of the episode, and we know from of old that Chris Carter has a serious, serious Virgin Mary fixation.

As with the stage Texans, Cancer Man is introduced into this hallucination to give us a government operative whose torture of Muslims is worse than what’s built into the episode’s plot. Mulder & Scully & Miller & Einstein may not be literally flogging people. But let us remember that **they are in a hospital interrogating a comatose, wounded, and dying man–and everyone is completely OK with that, including Shiraz’s own mother.** I mean Miller & Mulder & Scully call it “communicating with him,” but that’s more CYA bullshit. They are solely and only interested in extracting from him what the CIA in the golden days of the War on Terror was wont to call ‘actionable intelligence.’ This episode, in fact **actually dramatizes the ridiculous “ticking time bomb” scenario that was used during the Bush administration to justify torture.** Neither they, nor Chris Carter, are interested in ANYTHING Shiraz has to say except for who the other members of the cell are and where we can find them.Our quirky little romantic FBI quadrangle differs from the Abu Ghraib goons only in that their methods of extracting this information don’t involve inflicting physical pain. The fact that Miller, who started this whole interrogation, is represented by the episode as Shiraz’s protector is extra-infuriating. And so is the fact that, as it turns out, **the only thing Shiraz wants to communicate is exactly what Miller needs to hear**. An argument people made against the normalization of torture back during the Bush years was that under torture, subjects don’t tell the truth, they say whatever they believe will make the torture stop, which is whatever they think the interrogator wants to hear. The CIA gathered a lot of crap intelligence that way. But in Chris Carter’s miracle scenario, Mulder’s kinder, gentler, more mystical methods justify this interrogation by producing the truth. “You want the truth?” yells the hallucination’s torturer-in-chief, cracking the whip on Mulder’s naked back. “You’ve come to the right place!”

And when Shiraz’s mother is allowed to get out of her Virgin Mary garb and enter reality…oh my God, it gets worse. First of all, let’s think about what the odds actually are that an actual mother, in that situation, would spend the precious time she has at her dying son’s bedside talking to him–in English, a language we have never heard him speak–about how he surely must be innocent of what they have accused him of. It’s as if protesting his innocence before these white people is more important to her than the fact that she is about to lose her own child. Contrast Noora’s final moments with Shiraz with the way Glen Morgan handles the comatose Maggie’s death in “Home Again,” and you can start to see some of the ways in which Noora’s character has been completely and utterly colonized by Chris Carter’s own priorities. Noora’s function in this episode is to be, not a human mother, but the Blessed Mother, redeeming fallen humanity with her unconditional love. It is such an old trick, this use of the mother’s tuniversal love to spackle over the real political problems and the real material suffering caused by the blindness and greed and cruelty and ignorance of the asshole men who make the big political decisions. Ah, motherlove, so pure and good and untainted by worldliness, it will save us all. BULLSHIT! Every single human being doing evil in the world right now is the child of some mother; and their mothers’ love doesn’t stop them doing evil, any more than the knowledge that every Muslim is some mother’s child stops Donald Trump from dehumanizing them. Why should that man’s poor mother have to spend her son’s last moments convincing the rest of you that he’s a human being? Shouldn’t that already be obvious?

But apparently it is not. And it is high time to wind this down, so let me just address this final point by talking about the annoying intrusiveness of the songs in this episode. When Miller is at the airport watching the news, on screens which juxtapose the arrests of the cells with an image of the burning Twin Towers, he’s listening to a song whose refrain is “your secret heart.” It’s obviously meant to have some reference to himself and Einstein (and therefore, by analogy, to Mulder and Scully) since it’s all about how if you love that woman you should show her what’s in your secret heart. But in this context, it’s also about the inscrutability of the Other–the inability to understand the interiority of someone who would walk into an art gallery and blow it up, which has been on Miller’s mind since the beginning of the investigation. This whole episode was about trying to penetrate that inscrutable exterior and reach the heart and mind of this Muslim fanatic; the fact that the song choice fuses that part of Miller’s quest with his Thing for his red-haired partner is just one more function of this episode’s tone-deaf attempt to fuse a rom-com with an episode of _24_. But, and this is my point–the reason that the Secret Heart of the Terrorist is a mystery to you, Miller, is that **you do not really want to understand it.** You say you do; you’ve learned your smattering of Arabic, which is apparently an OK language to use if you’re a white guy in a suit working for the American government even though it’s extremely suspicious when used by brown people; you’re willing to seek out Mulder and his ‘extreme possibilities’ in order to ‘communicate.’ But all you really want to know about Muslims is how not to be blown up by one; and that’s why Shiraz’s “secret heart” remains a mystery TO YOU. Mulder is no better. His trip never takes him beyond the boundaries of his own fantasies; all Mulder sees on his journey is all the stuff he’s always seen, and the only thing he learns from Shiraz is the only thing he already cared about. 

All right. I have wasted enough of my life talking about this episode. To conclude: when we finally get to the scene on the porch, which finally gives us the bit of ship for which we suffered the consumption of this hideous confection, it is thoroughly contaminated with the same Christian chauvinism that led him to cast Shiraz’s mother as the Virgin Mary. We can, apparently, not allow Mulder and Scully to touch, or to come closer to each other emotionally, without discussing the will of God and literally having the heavens open and the last trumpet sound. Scully is surprised to see Mulder talk about God; and by God, so am I. Is this where the X-Files is heading–the absorption of the paranormal into Christianity–into, specifically, Scully’s waxing and waning Catholicism, and the eventual revelation of Christianity as the truth that Mulder has been seeking all this time? I fucking hope not; but how can I ignore the evidence? “The Sixth Extinction” turned Mulder into a Messiah figure. “A Christmas Carol,” “Emily,” and “Existence” cast Scully as the Virgin Mary. Carter spent most of IWTB using the occult to rehabilitate a pedophile priest responsible for raping dozens of underage boys, in a plot which also demonized a gay male couple and by extension same-sex marriage. Now he’s dragged in the Virgin Mary into this profoundly dishonest and casually exploitative story about how we can ignore all the political and material conditions that contribute to human suffering and solve it all by opening ourselves up to the irresistible power of…motherlove. After what you did to Dana Scully and HER motherlove, Chris, you have some fucking nerve.

My anger at this episode apparently knows no bounds; but my time does, and so I must end this review. I wish I could end it on a positive note; but I cannot. It hurts me to see how fossilized the show’s creator has become, how little he has been able to learn from the crimes of the Bush administration, how profoundly he has misunderstood the real lessons of 9/11, how he continues not to see anything wrong with treating the non-white Other as an impenetrable yet fascinating mystery. I want this show to be better than that. So, apparently, do Wong and the Morgan brothers. But Chris apparently still believes that Daddy knows best.


End file.
